Hardbanding or hardfacing refers to a process whereby a harder or more wear resistant material is applied to a surface of a base material to make the base material more resistant to wear and the like. In this regard, hardbanding may be applied to new parts or products to increase the wear resistance of that part, or to used or older parts or products in order to restore a worn surface of the part and to extend the working life of the part or product.
Hardbanding is used across a variety of industries and applications where mechanical parts or components are employed. In industries such as the oil and gas drilling industry, tool joints and stabilizers used in earth boring equipment are prone to experience a high degree of surface wear due to the particularly abrasive environments in which they are used. As such, the service life and the performance of the components can be significantly reduced, and this can have a detrimental effect on both industry productivity and worker safety.
Traditionally, titanium carbide alloys have been used for hardbanding industrial products such as, but not limited to, tool joints and stabilizers in oil and gas well drilling industry. However, as the industry currently experiences severe problems with service life of these tool joints and stabilizers as well as high casing wear, there is a demand for improved hardbanding materials.
Developing new materials are also fraught with difficulties as mixing complex carbides is problematic from a field service point of view. Further, any new material has to exhibit sufficiently desirable characteristics including, but not limited to, abrasion resistance, hardness, crack resistance.
Thus, there is a need to provide an improved hardbanding alloy composition having increased wear resistance properties and which can be efficiently applied to a variety of components to increase the operating life and performance of such components.
The above references to and descriptions of prior proposals or products are not intended to be, and are not to be construed as, statements or admissions of common general knowledge in the art. In particular, the above prior art discussion does not relate to what is commonly or well known by the person skilled in the art, but assists in the understanding of the inventive step of the present invention of which the identification of pertinent prior art proposals is but one part.